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Salon Saigon
Salon Saigon is an art museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It was one of my favorite destinations in Saigon for the beauty and grace of its 1960s design. The Salon Saigon collection shows cultural artifacts of the time as well as today’s Vietnamese artists. What strikes me now about Salon Saigon is its…
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Writing the Other
I grew up reading Louise May Alcott. I still have copies of all her books: dog-eared, broken-backed, and beloved. On the rare occasions when I get sick, it’s a toss-up between Alcott and Jane Austen as comfort reading. One of Alcott’s books, Eight Cousins, features a white character (Annabel) who marries the “highly satisfactory Chinaman”,…
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Saigon Stories
Every city has its own creation myth and Saigon is no exception. The name alone offers so many possibilities. Saigon could reference the forest of kapok trees that once stood on this site, an embankment on the river or a royal city. Today, Saigon is not a beautiful city. Crowded, noisy, thick with scooters. The…
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Model Minority
I have been a minority all my life. As the only girl in a neighborhood of boys, a downtrodden East Los Angeleno in a fancy-pants law school or a Chinese-American expat in the Netherlands. As minority experiences go, however, I can’t really complain. My kind doesn’t make trouble and so trouble rarely rains down on…